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Comment by ojbyrne | Hacker News Reader

I think its mostly set that low to disrupt potential competitors to Comcast like Netflix streaming movies and Hulu.

Might be. Just to put it in perspective, to hit the 250GB cap, you'd have to pull 809Kbps every second of a 30-day month. Considering that standard-definition Hulu is 480-700Kbps, you couldn't hit the cap no matter how much Hulu you watched. The 480p video on Hulu is encoded at 1Mbps peak H.264. Remember, that's 1Mbps peak. So, it is theoretically possible if you watched 480p Hulu for every second of every day that you could run into the cap.

Even if you share an internet connection with 3 other people, how much video can one watch? All four of you would each have to watch about 8 hours per day of Hulu to hit the cap. That's tough to do.

It's more against file-sharers. File-sharing is what really sucks bandwidth because people leave it on perpetually. It's also against people who should really be buying a fractional T1. At 809Kbps, you're using more than half a T1.

Plus, video is only going to become better compressed. H.264 is a great codec, but I'm sure we'll do better in another decade. So it isn't like it even hedges against higher definition video in the future.

edit: source of Hulu info: http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=blog&blog_id=4000000...

While codecs might get better, 480p is small potatoes compared to 1080p.

Moving 100kB/sec (when adding both upstream and downstream) all the time is pretty easy. Seeding legal torrents on the "unlimited" line I signed up for, could easily exceed that. If you're doing VOIP, running a couple legal torrents, and watching HD content from unbox, etc....

You have an "'unlimited' line" from Comcast? Did you get that in writing, because their website doesn't seem to indicate anywhere that it's unlimited. In fact, in the first 5 pages of google results, the only time Comcast uses the term unlimited with their internet service is to say "High-speed bandwidth and network resources are not unlimited." (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&..., http://www.comcast.com/customers/faq/FaqDetails.ashx?ID=4567).

In fact, it's impossible to be unlimited since that would imply infinite bandwidth per second. Once it isn't infinite bandwidth per second, you can interpret "unlimited" in a number of ways. You want it to be unlimited in terms of bandwidth transfer. Comcast could argue (if they ever used the term unlimited) that it is referring to how long you are allowed to be online and not how much you can transfer.

There are lots of legal things that cost money. Running your computer 24/7 costs more money (in electricity) than running it 8 hours a day. Go yell at the electric company! This isn't a matter of legality vs. illegality or proper use vs. improper use. The fact is that resources (whether it be bandwidth, electricity, or food) is limited. With bandwidth, it's easy to accommodate heavy users which is awesome (unlike electricity and food which generally scale up linearly in costs). That's great! It doesn't make bandwidth magic and there are still limitations. Yeah, limitations suck whether it be the fact that bandwidth needs some sort of metering or the fact that I can't transport myself across the country Star-Trek style. To be successful, one needs to understand, accept, and work within limitations to create and act in ways that work.

Try this: http://www.google.com/search?q=comcast%20advertising%20unlim...

You'll see that they have lawsuits against them for falsely advertising unlimited internet access, as well as many reports of them advertising "unlimited" services.

Sure, feel free to argue that unlimited would really be infinite bandwidth, infinite transfer speed, etc.. That's fine.

I'm also fine to pay more money. Maybe I get 250GB for my base rate, and then a reasonable fee for overages, providing there's a way to monitor my usage (like my cell phone). I'm happy to pay for what I use. Just don't cut me off:)

Wait, bandwidth isn't magic!? :)

edit-----

Imagine if the water company said "for a flat $50 per month, you'll get our great 6 gallon/minute water service!", and then, 4 years later changed the deal to say "only up to 2,500 gallons per month, then we cut you off", that's a big change, and not one for the better.

It's a tough situation :). On the one hand, it isn't as good as it used to be (as you point out with the water company analogy). On the other hand, that also points to the fact that people can just be wasteful of what is a communal resource - or they can just use more because they're ridiculously thirsty people, either way, less for others/more required.

Hopefully, Comcast will keep the cap high and offer rates scaling up linearly (or preferable logarithmically).

I guess I'm a bit luckier than most people since I have the option of FiOS, Comcast or RCN and both Verizon and RCN offer service at 20Mbps (with Comcast being the slow-poke at 8Mbps). Most are limited to cable or DSL. So, I don't have the same concern on a personal level that Comcast will decide in 6 months to move the cap down to 150GB or 100GB or 75GB. I just have other options.

If Comcast tries to pull that, I hope the government steps in since they do have monopolies in most areas they serve (because who would use DSL). Maybe a nice formula specifying norms and standard deviations could be created that would automatically set and raise levels as people's bandwidth consumption increased? That sounds like a good plan? This way providers have to keep up with the times (so they can't just start offering crap service hiding behind caps), but it still deals with the issue that there are some people who just use, use, use way outside the norm.

But maybe Comcast's intent is to get people used to the idea of a cap. Today it is 250G - what's to say it might not be 150G in 2 years and 50G base in 5 years time and you pay for anything over and above. At that time there won't be such an outcry since the 'unlimited' concept would have become history.

Conversely it could be a 500GB cap in 2 years. Bandwidth gets cheaper and faster. My cable modem is twice the speed it used to be and doesn't cost more.

And of course the quality (and thus bandwidth required) for Hulu / Netflix / etc will only go up.

Just to disrupt your calculations, in Canada the largest ISP has a 95 gb/month cap. Its coming...

The typical one is 60 gig/month

Which is kind of awful. Though in my recent experience, roger's extreme is too damn slow for me to ever get near the caps.

250 gigabytes is about sixty DVD-quality movies. That's two a day. I'd think you would run out of movies worth watching pretty fast at that rate.

Ha, the way Hollywood is these days, you'd run out in two days.

My problem with this argument is that nobody does 10000s of emails and nothing but...all movies and nothing else...et cetera. You don't have to watch 250gb of sixty DVD-copy-quality movies - all you need is a small and active household doing everything from movies to ordinary streaming video, regular surfing and other miscellaneous downloads, and hitting 250gb may not seem so unrealistic then.

250gb is also sort of generous now, but consider that bandwidth usage can only go up from here as doing things like renting HD movies from iTunes becomes more popular. Also that a lot of people don't have a choice over who they can get service with.

Right now on my 10/1 cable (thankfully not comcast) connection, my router tells me I've used up about 195gb down and 40gb up for a total of 235gb since August 1st. I don't think we've even come close to 60 DVDs..

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